Tips to Survive Schooling from Home
Whether you ever thought you would be reading a post about schooling from home or not is irrelevant. You are reading this probably because:
1. You are looking at the upcoming school year with your school-aged children and you feel concerned or disappointed about their education.
2. You are curious about what homeschooling is all about, and/or
3. You are a parent always looking for good ideas and helpful resources.
No matter what, I got you. Let’s start by taking a deep breath. Know you aren’t alone.
Remember: this is possible. You will have rough days, but it also may be the most rewarding of days.
Here are a few things I want to encourage you to consider as you look to the future. This is written for both the parents who are not committing to Homeschool forever, and those who are committed to an alternative way of learning as long as God will allow.
Please know each of these guiding principles are essential for any parent schooling from home, even if you find yourself in the toddler years!
1. Pray.
No worthwhile or difficult adventure should begin without prayer. Pray for wisdom. Pray for your heart. Pray for your children. Pray for guidance. Pray for patience. Don’t stop praying. No one Homeschools because they “have” the patience for it, or because they “know” how to do it. There is a daily surrendering and a daily training involved with our hearts, as we seek to engage our children no matter what your school choice. Know ahead of time, it is a sanctifying process, but is always worth it. This may be an unexpected adjustment in a time of extreme uncertainty. There will be varying emotions, so use your days to talk through any questions that come up. Remember, these are your children. You are more equipped than you think to reach their hearts and engage with them. Extra time together, away from all of their peers, can be extremely sweet. It may take time for both of you to adjust to your new rhythm, so be mindful and give grace to one another.
There are no superpowers involved, but rather an intentional choice and learning to take it one day at a time. Have fun with it. Pray and be patient with yourself and with your children. It will be OK.
2. Get creative.
It might seem ridiculous to say out loud, but if you are used to having them stimulated all day at school, at a sports activity, or at a play date, then it can become a daunting challenge to actually sit and engage together. Create some fun and get creative! Ask - what are things your family or your child loves? Start there and jump off.
Start a ‘Reading Challenge’. Make it a competition that whoever reads the most books by the end of two weeks gets a prize. In our family, we are going to log reading minutes instead of books, then will see who has read the most minutes after two weeks. That helps level the playing field for my older ones who read books at different paces.
Start a flourishing jar. Find a mason jar and use pom poms, cotton balls, pennies, anything you can fit inside of it to acknowledge when someone in the family helps serve someone else. Every small, thoughtful action causes the entire family to flourish. When it fills up, decide on a treat for everyone to enjoy.
Learn a new language! Rosetta Stone is offering three months of free lessons!
Watch a Broadway show from the comfort of your home. Visit this site to see what shows are available and how to find them.
Take a real life or virtual museum tour HERE and admire beauty. Allow it to stimulate discussions on history, art, and culture.
Go on a backyard nature adventure or an apartment scavenger hunt and add some fun to what can otherwise be a frustrating few weeks.
Take turns creatively making meals out of what you have in your pantry! See what you come up with or let a child help with dinner one night. Take turns.
Play games. Play family board games, card games, hide and seek in the dark, etc.
Listen to a good book together. In addition to the library online or Audible, Vooks is a free resource for a month, and for teachers for a year (as a Homeschool mom you qualify as a teacher)!
Have a lego building competition. It’s your very own episode of Lego Masters!
Have a movie marathon day. This is always a fun idea!
Listen to a podcast that tells a story, encourages your heart, gets you thinking as a family.
Make a movie together. On iMovie, our older kids love to create their own productions and it will keep them busy creating for hours!
Enjoy a dress-up tea party (you can dress up to!) and read picture books.
Play music. I love having music playing around the house while the kids are working. It helps me and them!
Have a dance party. Need a little joy this week? Turn up the tunes and show your best moves.
Take a free Watercolor art lesson. Emily Lex from Jones Design Company is offering free classes right now! Get your art set out and see what they create. Try doing it with your kids.
3. Set goals.
You, as the parent, or your spouse may need to still need to work from home, so how you steward your time matters. What are some things that you would like to focus on at home with your child(ren)? This time can pass by and you can merely survive, or you can intentionally plan on one thing to focus on each day or each week. Setting a vision can keep you moving toward a common goal as a family, and help you weed out that which doesn’t need to be apart of your day.
Divide up daily chores to ensure everything around the house is being shared now that you are all there together. It will be a helpful practice so that you don’t completely lose your mind.
Decide on a character trait you want to focus on with each child. They can be the same for everyone or different. Then use the concentrated time together to focus on that one thing and don’t forget to celebrate when you see it in action!
Focus on your priorities. Make a plan if you get nothing else done that day, what would you want to accomplish? Math flash cards? Reading? You get the point. Naming what you find essential to keeping your kids engaged and learning will help you celebrate progress.
Start projects that include your kids! We don’t have to keep our kids distracted so that we can get things done. Find things you can do together! My daughter loves family pictures and videos, I have asked if she would help me start to organize them by year and event, so that we can make family memory photobooks.
Spring clean. Now is your chance! You have no excuses that you have to be somewhere else, and you can use your new found labor force right inside your home!
Sort through those closets. Warmer weather is coming! Start now. Engage the kids to help you. Organizing your daily life will help create peace amidst projected chaos.
Garage projects. Organize the tools, outdoor toys, let the woodworking projects commence!
Teach a new skill. Teach them how to do their own laundry or how to empty the dishwasher, if they don’t already.
4. Create a rhythm.
It may feel like a holiday, but the last thing you need right now is to let the kids run wild, demanding entertainment from you left and right. The most life-giving thing, trust me on this, will be to create a rhythm to give some order and purpose for your day even if the majority of the day is free time.
What does that mean?
Divide your day into 30 minute increments.
Your school-aged children may have work sent from their teachers to work on throughout the day, or you may be their teacher deciding what your focus is on currently. I recommend sitting down and even if you are told you need to accomplish some work from the school while on this hiatus, don’t forget to think about what you, the parent, would like to accomplish with your family.
Start with the first 30 minutes and allocate: is it breakfast? Is it a chore? Then continue from there. For us, we have breakfast around 7am and our organized time for schooling starts around 8am. Before 8am, the kids understand that they are to get dressed, have breakfast, clean up their dishes, do their morning chore, gather their materials for the first subject and then enjoy free time until we start. In all honestly, this time change has messed us up and we are getting a later start so we are just pushing everything back by 30 minutes. That’s the beauty. It’s meant to help you establish a rhythm, not a strict schedule. Relish in the freedom of it all.
Tailor it for your family.
Here is where you get to enjoy the benefits of homeschooling. If you are a family that needs more sleep in the mornings, then start your official work time at 10am or 11am. You get the picture. The 30 minute increments will serve as your guide and help you feel like you have a purpose to the days rather than a free for all. I promise it will go well for you and your children and help to manage expectations for all of you.
I have a guide to CREATE YOUR OWN DAILY RHYTHM on my resources tab. It will give you a list of ideas to plug into your own schedule. You can add screen time, outdoor time and snack time, but having a set aside slot for those areas ensures that you are still able to bring purpose and order to this unique season. My personal favorite time slot is quiet time for kids and Momma! Subscribe now so you don’t miss a thing!
Look at your week holistically.
I have included a sample schedule below that I created in Excel. It will look differently for each child. To help you, you can download a template for FREE on my resources tab, or click HERE. You can also SUBSCRIBE to receive updates and helpful information ahead of time.
You can see below how classes and family rhythms marry. That’s the beauty of it!
5. Consult Resources.
** There are so many resources, this is just scratching the surface for what your specific desires and needs are in this season. Start here with a few of our family’s favorites. If you are reading and have a favorite resource you would recommend, please leave a comment and share with me and someone else! You do not have to re-create the wheel here. Many have gone before us and have offered fantastic resources to tap into for any given need or desire. **
Online schools: The Potter School, Veritas Press, and Memoria Press are some classical Christian schools to consider. Our kids 4th grade and up take classes from The Potter School, but Veritas Press has self-paced classes that would be great to help fill in the gaps, not only for your child now, but especially in this unique season.
Ambleside Online is a fabulous and FREE curriculum by age, religiously neutral and from a Charlotte Mason approach. I highly recommend it as a resource at any time. Keep in mind Year 0 refers to Kindergarten and Year 1 is 1st Grade, etc. It will literally point you in any direction and give you a wealth of information.
IEW - Institute for Excellence in Writing - is offering 3 weeks of FREE English and Grammar classes! Check them out.
Real Aloud Revival has book lists that are great for finding books for any age child to read. Check it out!
The HSLDA is an association that has helpful resources for getting started in homeschooling by state requirement, etc.
Pinterest is a wealth of information, free printables, etc. by grade level.
Classical Conversations, also a classical Christian organization, has apps that you can download that literally go through an entire curriculum of Math, History, Science, English, Geography, and Latin. There are 3 cycles: I. Ancient Civilizations, II. European History and the Middle Ages III. US History. Even if you don’t plan on doing it forever, it may be a great resource to engage all of you! On Pinterest you can find printables, color sheets, science experiments to correspond to each Cycle and Week.
I will talk about specific books that helped frame our view on what schooling from home can look like and what curriculum we use in the next few posts, so if you are wanting to check out specific curriculum, you can.
6. Continue to Connect.
This can become a lonely or isolating time if you let it. Make sure you and your family are still intentionally connecting with others. It is essential for us as a full-time Homeschool family to connect often, even if that looks differently year to year. Honestly, our calendar is so full, I have to say no often. So, options are out there!
Local Co-ops and student sports teams are the best way to go!
Continue to engage in meaningful conversations with those inside your home. There are some great table questions like THESE that are fun to ask with everyone around family dinner. There are some for adults, teens, etc.
Ask questions and don’t feel like you have to make sense of it all by yourself. Start by asking them here! I am happy to help in any way: one-on-one coaching, specific resources and encouragement. There are many resources available for you and I am happy to help in any way I can. I do not make money on anything I recommend - it is simply and honestly to just help.
7. Think Outside the Desk.
The biggest mistake any parent makes when first deciding to school from home is to try and recreate the same environment as a school, complete with a perfect desk and organized cubbies. While those are helpful at times, let me remind you that schooling from home is an opportunity to NOT look the same way as it does at school. This should free you from trying to create the perfect school space. I homeschooled my three children living in a two-bedroom Manhattan apartment. The “school/play area” was a designated space that shared space with the living room. Even now in a four bedroom house, the majority of our school work takes place at our dining room table, on the couch, and outdoors.
The second trap we can fall into is looking at it as an 8-3pm endeavor. Let me remind you - you have freedom here! Let them work for an hour and then take a break outside to play while the sun is out. If it’s raining, you may get more done, and if it’s a glorious day you may do very little indoors. Just remember, it all counts. Don’t feel like this is impossible because you don’t have a whiteboard hanging and lockers to put their work. That can be figured out later. The heart work, the engaging, the time together can take place in a variety of settings.
8. Embrace the Mess.
Anytime we live life together, there is bound to be mess. Learning is messy. Kids home every day will get messy. You will do yourself a favor to set aside clean-up times. For our family we do a clean up before lunch and another before dinner. It helps us keep the clutter and chaos to a minimum, but still allow for learning and fun to take place throughout the day. I know it’s difficult, but sometimes our desire for clean and peaceful can trump the opportunity for learning and engaging.
I do hope this encourages you and helps you begin to look at the future with the opportunity that it is, even as we wait for life to seem more normal. Most importantly, remember you aren’t alone.
